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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
BYLINE: Laura Jacobs
The genre was a winner for the movies, right from the start. Requirements were minimal: a big city, three pretty faces, some wolves. Sally, Irene and Mary was the first-silent but scrappy in 1925-a tale of three chorus girls looking for love and limelight in New York, New York (one of them was a hungry young actress named Joan Crawford). In Our Blushing Brides, 1930, it was three shopgirls-one of them, again, Joan Crawford. In 1932's Three on a Match, the girls were childhood friends, all grown up and sharing bites of the Big Apple-shiny, wormy-only this time the Joan was blonde, as in Blondell. Throughout the 30s and into the 40s, three-girls-in-the-city had to make room for three-boys-back-from-war. (In those days returning soldiers were as hopeful, as vulnerable, as young women.) Two is just two: left and right, yes and no, Goofus and Gallant. Four is fine for TV-see HBO's Sex and the City-but one too many for film (A Letter to Four Wives was fixed by subtraction: A Letter to Three Wives won the Oscars). Three is destiny. When blushing brides play with matches, one girl wins, one draws, one dies.
Who would have thought the ultimate three-girls-in-the-city flick would premiere not in the flapper-fast 20s, the satin-slouch 30s, or the shoulder-pad 40s, but in the white-glove, bullet-bra 50s? In 1959, with considerable fanfare, Twentieth Century Fox premiered The Best of Everything, a title it took seriously. The movie was in CinemaScope, of course, as were all major Fox films after 1953, and the color was by DeLuxe. Indeed, "deluxe" was the operative word, from the orchestral score, as plush as expensive perfume (Shalimar is the boss's last name), to the running time of 121 minutes (twice that of Three on a Match), to the skyline-and-sidewalk location work that opens the movie up while holding it down to earth (un-deluxing it a little, letting it breathe). The credit sequence alone is a perk, a thrill, a tone poem to arrival, home movies meet Hart Crane. The camera flies in over a hazy Manhattan at dawn, eyes the city from the far side of the East River (a barge floats by), then glides along Park Avenue like a limo with the windows down. The streets are empty, a strange and lovely sight to any New Yorker, then slowly the rush begins, cars in tunnels and curving off ramps, girls coming up subway stairs at Rockefeller Center, girls swinging hatboxes from Bonwit's as they step out of bomb-shaped buses (Fox in the 50s loved buses).
"All that sublime photography of New York that is also so incredibly dull," says fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, host of the 1996 New York screening of The Best of Everything, a revival-reunion sponsored by American Movie Classics. "They just had a really good day and they shot it, at a slightly good angle. And they're all going to work. You see hundreds of people going to work. It's so inspiring."
Not least because it's carried on the voice of young Johnny Mathis-Cognac and cream-who sings the Alfred Newman-
Sammy Cahn title song as if he were hovering between the last longing of the night and the first reverie of the day (sample lyric: "That one little sigh-is treasure / you cannot buy-or measure").
"I loved it," Mathis says of the Oscar-nominated song. "It was absolutely at the beginning. I was living in a broom closet at the Wellington Hotel"-seriously, the manager had put a bed in there-"and I walked to the studio, which was a long way away, but I composed myself as I was walking."
A slim melody, long-line like the girdles everyone was wearing, it has a rising inflection, lonely, yearning. This was the last song Newman wrote as Fox music director-a legendary run of 20 years-and he marked the score "Moderately (with much feeling)," not only setting the tone of the movie, the smooth, poised pace, but also capturing something of the era, the steady surface, the heart's bottled-up position within parentheses. Few movies are such pleasurably perfect time capsules, but then, perfection was a 50s ideal. There would be nothing moderate about the next big three-girl movie: in 1967, Valley of the Dolls popped open the bottle and gulped down the time capsule, along with anything else in reach.
No, The Best of Everything was a class act. "It was not just another movie," says Julian Myers, a publicist at Fox from 1948 to 1961. "The making of it was relatively high-charged. It had more energy and it had more meaning." It also had a pride of Fox's most promising young stars-Hope (Peyton Place) Lange, Stephen (Ben-Hur) Boyd, Suzy (top model in the world) Parker, Diane (Diary of Anne Frank) Baker, Martha (future wife of producer Hal B. Wallis) Hyer, Robert (future head of production at Paramount Pictures) Evans-and two excellent older men: Brian (English stage actor) Aherne and Louis (Gigi) Jourdan. And by God if the queen of the genre doesn't come up at the end of the acting credits, but there it is, "Joan Crawford as Amanda Farrow," a name to make film buffs weep at the rightness (and also the wrong: her first supporting role). The most important credit, though, the muscle behind the movie-the might, really, behind Fox in the late 50s-is the one that comes up first, before the title: "Jerry Wald's Production of."
That apostrophe s says it all. No producer in Hollywood history had a bigger embrace than Jerry Wald, or possessed the stuff of movies-genres, plots, scenes, routines, even lines of dialogue-with such brio. His mind, as director Philip Dunne writes in Take Two, "was a magpie's nest crammed with situations, characters, and plot devices he had gleaned from his omnivorous reading of every writer from Euripides to Proust." And his file cabinets were famous in the business, filled with newspaper and magazine stories-"no matter how weird, outlandish, or esoteric," remembers director Richard Fleischer-that might someday point to a film project, a movie the public was growing ready for. For instance, Wald developed the W.W. II movie Destination Tokyo from an article in Time.
"Wald was bigger than life," says Julian Myers, "not really that tall but big around, and a very colorful guy. Quick to laugh, smile, be jolly, and didn't worry too much about who owned what. His legs moved too fast and richly to be concerned with little things like that."
"He didn't trample on anybody," says actor and director Mel Ferrer, a good friend of Wald's. Yet he never stopped sifting the air for ideas. "He was the only person I ever knew who could write in his pocket," Ferrer continues. "He had a little pad and pencil, and if he had an idea when he was talking to somebody, or when he was looking at a picture, his hand would go into his pocket and he would be writing down his ideas for the plot."
"The important thing about Jerry was his passion for movies," says writer Gavin Lambert, who worked with Wald at Fox and wrote the screenplay for Sons...
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